


The Clobber Verses

by GoldStarGrl



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Asexual Character, Catholic Guilt, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Spoilers through current season I guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-01
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-27 12:27:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10020779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Cursing doesn’t work. Self-flagellation doesn’t work. Praying to be like Charlie, to get every urge and feeling scooped out of him rather than bend the wrong way, doesn’t work.It’s starting to occur to him that this might be permanent.





	

**Author's Note:**

> "The clobber verses" are a nickname for the seven verses of the Catholic Bible that are explicitly anti-gay.

**i.**

He’s jealous, sometimes, of Charlie’s complete lack of sex drive.

When they were kids, Charlie would spout the typical little-boy comments about how gross girls were, how he was never getting married. Whenever he said stuff like that in front of his mom, Mrs. Kelly would just smile. “You boys'll change your mind someday.”

Mac, even at six, seven years old, felt anxiety pooling in his stomach at the thought.

But it never came, the day when Charlie started chasing short skirts or making lewd comments about his friends' sisters. He followed rats and stray dogs down alleys and distracted Mac’s mom while he stole beer and sat around under the bleachers with him huffing glue.

They never talked about girls, about sex or even dating, unless someone else was around, like Dennis, loudly boasting about his latest conquest.

By the time they were twenty, and spent the past two years with only each other, watching friends from high school head off to college one by one, they stopped mentioning it at all. And that was more than fine in Mac's eyes. The word  _relief_ could probably be employed.

 

**ii.**

Only once did Mac raise the issue, as they kicked a loose stone down the street behind his house, passing a bottle of whiskey wrapped in paper back and forth. Charlie yammered, slightly distressed, about a dirty movie his uncle watched on TV last night, with a lady who took her top off, and who wanted to see that?

“Charlie, when are you gonna bone someone?”

Charlie blinked, startled. He held out the bag to Mac. “What?”

Mac took another long gulp before speaking. “You’re like the only virgin I know, dude. I didn't even know people could _be_ virgins in their twenties. What gives?”

He was being nasty, pushing smug, but he couldn't stop himself. At least _he'd_ banged a couple chicks. _He_ was doing everything on time, everything normal.

Charlie shrugged, scratching the side of his head, at a smear of dirt behind his ear. “I dunno. I just don’t want to.”

“Everybody wants to.” It was true, even if sometimes certain aspects of wanting to...got confused. That part was just a test from God.

Charlie shrugged and ducked his head, looking uncomfortable for the first time. “I just don’t, okay? It’s gross.” He snatched the paper bag back from Mac and screwed his eyes up tight, like he was in pain, and finished off the rest. “Can we-can we-why are we still-"

"Jesus Christ Charlie, calm down."

"I'm calm!" His shoulders hiked up under his baggy sweatshirt. "I got some paint thinner in my room, wanna go?”

 _He doesn’t even know how lucky he is._ Mac thought, lying on the carpet of Charlie’s bedroom later that night, high and floaty and dizzy. _He doesn’t understand how much worse it is to want it._

Mac never stopped finding girls gross either.

But if God wouldn’t fix him, if He couldn’t reverse the thoughts about Dennis Reynolds, about the badass guy who owned the dojo down the street, about every goddamn queer who smiled at him in the afternoon and then made an appearance in his dreams that night, pushing his thighs apart, cupping his neck, kissing him like in a goddamn movie, maybe He could at least make them stop all together. Clean slate. Still no girls...but no boys either.

That seemed like a trade-off Mac could live with.

He pressed his hands together and mouthed the words, too scared to even whisper them for fear of waking Charlie, for letting him hear. _Please._ He said. _Please make me like Charlie. Please just make it stop._

 

**iii.**

Mac doesn’t cry because he’s not a pussy. The last time he cried was in the second grade, when an unexpected thunderstorm meant the bridge he and Charlie were going to meet under - Charlie told him he found a whole family of dead birds down there - was flooded, their plans for the afternoon washed away with it.

“This sucks!” He shrieked through his tears. “I hate God!”

His mother’s hand came out of nowhere and knocked against the side of his head. “Don’t ever fucking say that.” She wheezed, and toddled out of the kitchen, letting the trail of smoke from her cigarette waft back into his wet eyes, stinging them double.

 

**iv.**

But sometimes he fights. He fights for most of his twenties. He screams into his couch pillows when he knows no one is around or he smashes plates behind the bar and a few times he karate chopped the wall in the back office and broke his fingers. _I hate you!_ He spits silently, to himself, still not daring to say it out loud _. Why did you make me like this? What the fuck did I do to deserve this kind of torture?_

As soon as he calms down he’ll fall to his knees and beg forgiveness, the guilt pushing up through his stomach so hard he nearly throws up. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Please don’t hurt me._ Sometimes he slaps himself or pounds his fist against his own chest for good measure.  _I'll do anything, just please don't leave me with this, all alone._

Cursing doesn’t work. Self-flagellation doesn’t work. Praying to be like Charlie, to get every urge and feeling scooped out of him rather than bend the wrong way, doesn’t work.

The closest he ever gets to crying is the day it occurs to him that this might be permanent.

 

**v.**

_“God never gives us more than we can handle.”_

A priest told him that once, when he went to confession and blurted out, rushed and red faced with shame, the wet dream he had about Dennis blowing him, and that he was sorry and he was going to try to be more careful. And Father Ellis just assigned him ten Hail Marys and said that. “Take a deep breath, son. God never gives us more than we can handle.”

That made him feel a little bit better. Made him feel tough. God couldn’t trust other people with this, carrying around a big gay sin like this. Just a bad-ass like him.

It’s not like he ever pictured some picket-fence life, a wife with a pretty dress and two kids and a big house with lights and heat that never shut off. He’s always known who he was, what limitations the world had pinned on him. People who grew up with stolen Christmas presents and teachers handing them trade school flyers in lieu of college applications didn’t get lives like that. This...this gay thing was just one more way he was going to be different, from his heroes or his rich friends.

Jesus didn’t go to college either. Jesus was pretty fucking different, too.

 

**vi.**

He kisses a man for the first time - not jerks him off, not fucks or blows, kisses - when he’s thirty-four years old and drunk at a bar he usually forces himself not to look towards. He wore a shirt with sleeves, too, just to really cement to himself how tonight was going to be a Different Night. If it didn’t work, it didn’t count.

He only hits himself once after, too. And on the leg, not the face.

He still loves the Eagles. He still wears combat boots and does karate in his living room and goes to St. Patrick's every Sunday and has tattoos and the highest tolerance for whiskey of anyone he knows. This surprises him, for some reason. That the Queer Thing didn't make everything badass about him - everything that made him Mac - fade away or something. 

He's still him.

Baby steps.

 

**vii.**

“Just come out. You’ll feel better.”

He hated to admit it - like, really, deep in his core, the concept disgusted him - but Dee was right. So was Dennis, which was a little easier to take. Dennis was really smart.

His hands were a little shaky, and his face felt hot as he left the arbitration, but not the way it did when he was embarrassed. More like it was when he was really, really drunk, and all the blood rushed to his head and everything was loose and happy.

When he was a kid, he used to feel God like a little camera in the back of his head (“Can it do fun shit with the pictures? Like make it Old West colored?” Charlie asked, the one time he tried to explain it.) Always watching, a presence attached to him wherever he went, whatever he did.

As he headed down the sidewalk, dragging his bike against the cement with a loud scraping noise, at forty years old, he realized his head felt loose too. Like something, cameralike and critical, had been ripped out for the first time in memory, leaving a bare, airy space for...well.

God only knows.


End file.
